There
are issues with the teacher tenure and seniority systems.But abolishing tenure and seniority would be
an inadequate solution, and would simply pander to the public perception that
“bad” teachers are impossible to fire and represent the biggest problem with
California schools.I recently had a
conversation with a veteran teacher of over 40 years, who ridiculed the popular
notion that teachers are impossible to fire, and argued that school
administrators have plenty of tools at their disposal to fire bad teachers or
to establish more rigorous means of granting tenure, but simply lack the interest
in expending effort doing difficult and necessary things that do take time.

I
saw on many occasions first-hand at Foothill High School in Palo Cedro how
little effort administrators put into evaluating teachers.I was routinely in classes where principals
and vice-principals sat in to evaluate a teacher, and this inevitably consisted
of them sitting at the back of the room playing with their cell phone, never
once looking up.In one class, a
disgusted economics teacher actually stopped talking mid-sentence, and gestured
contemptuously towards the administrator in the rear of the classroom, who
never knew what was going on.All the
tools to protect poor and minority students from bad teachers are in place:
administrators are simply too often too lazy to use them.

A
tenure- and seniority-less system also opens the door to abuses by the
nepotistic, good ol’ boy, and frequently macho culture that I’ve seen and heard
about in many administrative offices and school boards, a culture in which
people with the right connections and political views are absorbed into the
system, and those unfortunate enough to deviate are left out in the cold.A tenure- and seniority-less system would
substitute the arbitrary preference of administrators—often bizarrely tuned out
from the real world of the classroom—for merit.

Moreover,
in an era in which schools are seeing their resources constantly eroded,
support staff drained away, and their rationale questioned by one of our two
big political parties, a tenure- and seniority-less system would create
financial incentives for school administrators to generate quick turn-over
amongst teachers to avoid paying higher salaries and better benefits to veteran
teachers.Such turn-over, needless to
say, would not benefit the students who are supposed to be the focus of this
conversation.

Republican
gubernatorial GOP candidate Neel Kashkari has come out quietly against such teacher
protections in embracing the L.A. judge’s ruling.Of course Kashkari—the man whose woolly-sounding
policy proposals could fit on the kleenex on which he presumably dreamt them
up—does not say how he would attract people to a job that only pays nine months
a year, does not pay a high salary, does not come close to compensating good
teachers for the hours they put in outside of their work-day, and for which
Kashkari and much of the public have nothing but contempt.At least today the job comes with a modicum
of security, although assaults on the public sphere like that launched by the
Republicans over the past several decades and Jerry Brown during his tenure in
office shake even that security.But
absent that security, it would become even more difficult to attract good
teaches to schools.

Kashkari
promised to be a different kind of Republican.But his party does not care about the “poor and minority children” the
L.A. Judge cited in his decision.His
party has spent the last several decades stripping money from the public
schools that serve those children and attempting to create a parallel
privatized, voucherized system to serve affluent and/or religious families.

It
didn’t take long in this campaign for Kashkari’s kindly mask to drop, his
economic fundamentalism leaping out at any opportunity to slaver through the
bars, promising to beat up on the people responsible for educating our children
rather than addressing the hamstrung system in which those teachers work and
children learn.

Kashkari
recently whined, “Just pouring more money into the same old education system
does not yield better results”.

But
a statement of this nature reveals the extent to which Kashkari is out of touch
with reality and with the needs of our school system.Because it is not the “same old education
system” to which older generations hark back ad nausea when they want an excuse
to avoid paying their fair share into our public institutions.California’s 21st century
classrooms are not the socially and linguistically homogenous classrooms of
yore, representing a society that had made a firm investment in its middle
class.

We
live in a demographically-transformed state in which we need to educate a new
kind of citizen to labour in a new kind of economy to create a new kind of
society.This requires a different
approach to learning, which cannot be of the cheap, rote variety that long
dominated our classrooms.It requires
different kinds of technology, which costs money to overhaul and install.And it requires a different kind of teaching,
with better teacher-student ratios, more emphasis on writing and
experimentation, and a tremendous focus on critical thinking.And this kind of teaching and learning
requires large numbers of teachers who are well-equipped, well-supported, and
well-motivated.

The
Darwinian school system which Kashkari envisions, in which teachers are motivated
by fear and the crack of the administrator’s whips, and students by a mad
scramble not to fall through the growing cracks in their poorly-funded and
ill-maintained education system, will not work.And the Republican candidate’s cheap efforts at populism are as hollow
as his party’s commitment to justice and equality.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.